Josef Albers: roaring diagonals and paradisiacal squares

Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his long engagement with the square, which he painted in exquisite variation more than a thousand times. A German–American painter, he trained in Berlin and Munich before enrolling at the Bauhaus (the leading modernist art and design school) in 1920. He was a student there for three years and a teacher for ten (longer than anyone else), his chosen craft was stained glass, and his teaching ranged from typography to furniture. In 1933 he moved to America and began to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Among his students was Robert Rauschenberg, who acknowledged Albers as ‘the most important teacher I’ve ever had’. Albers’s work combined Catholic mysticism with precise method, the cerebral with the sensual, in a deeply engaging way. His apparently severe geometries grow ever more human as you get to know them.

Albers was obsessed with colour, and employed in his paintings hues as bright as the tints of the autumn leaves he told his students to collect.